Sunday, June 3, 2012

We've all been there: whether it be a half-second lull in conversation or a pop-up notification, your mind jumps out of the moment and into another, only to be pulled away once more, onto the next distraction. Despite our capacity to easily switch from one subject to another, that skill of multitasking (or rather, the perception of skill) might be doing more harm than good. Joe Kraus, a Partner at Google Ventures, put together a presentation explaining how our inability to concentrate has negatively affected the culture of always-connected users and what we can do to convert "distraction" into "attention."

Kraus points out a number of bad habits — like how we check our smartphones 27 times a day and that teenage girls send 4,000 texts a month....